Delhi’s centenary as a capital

More than pomp and frolics

The growing heft of an Indian megacity

A HUNDRED years ago the world came to Delhi. On December 12th 1911 great lines of elephants bearing princes tramped from the old Mughal city to a patch of land converted into a massive amphitheatre ringed by cupolas. Some 100,000 visitors rattled there along miles of new roads and a special railway line. The fanfare was for a touring British king, George V, in India to celebrate his recent coronation with a “durbar”, a show of might designed to attest to the permanency of imperial rule.

Few standing in the cool winter sunshine imagined the occupiers would be bundled away within four decades. The durbar caused wonder. British newspapers dubbed it “the greatest show on earth”. Some 562 Indian princes—among them noted tyrants, social liberals and the Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the world's richest men—paid homage to the king in his purple and golden robes.

Dilliwallahs this week marked the centenary with little more than a post-colonial shrug. “There is no hype”, said one, noting officials' lack of fuss. Sheila Dikshit, Delhi's chief minister, spoke of her “ambivalence” over it. An engineer working in a forlorn, half-renovated “Coronation Park”—the original site of the pomp and frolics, now scattered with donkeys and neglected statues of the king and his viceroys—said residents had plenty of more recent things to celebrate.

Yet the event also marked the renaissance of a great city, lived in for over two millennia. King George declared Delhi again to be India's capital, as it had been under Mughal rulers, relegating Calcutta to a mere trading entrepot. The wide avenues and green spaces; and the buildings in Sir Edwin Lutyens's new classical style, with more than the occasional Mughal flourish: all have served the city well. (Indian ministers lord it in their grand offices as arrogantly as any Britisher did.) William Dalrymple, an historian, calls it “one of the greatest urban successes of the 20th century”.

Now, with rapid economic growth, Delhi is blossoming. This year's census found its population—swollen early on by Punjabi refugees, more recently by a steady gush of migrants from all over India—to be 16.7m, up from just 410,000 in 1911. Count the exurbs in neighbouring states, and that swells to 21m.

Already one of the largest urban areas on the planet, and growing fast, its national dominance is thus assured (though so, too, are dreadful air pollution, a lack of clean water and vast, sprawling slums). Dilliwallahs are more than twice as rich as the average Indian, earning 116,800 rupees ($2,170) a year each. The City's status is near to that of a state—akin to Washington, DC, within the United States. Its $40 billion economy is growing by 10.5% a year.

Tellingly, in a country with wretched roads and other infrastructure, Delhi enjoys a swanky new airport, served by India's only high-speed train, and a fast-expanding, air-conditioned metro which carries 1.8m people a day. Already 190km (120 miles) long, that is set to grow to 440km in a decade—bigger than London's underground. That's one in the old imperialists' eye.